Welcome Home

by Eric Smith

  “Don’t—” I start to say.

  “You’re adopted, right?” Warren asks, interrupting me.

  I freeze.

  That question. Of course he asks that question. Everyone always asks that question eventually. And even though the answer’s yes, I’m so damn sick of that question because—no matter how well you do in school, no matter how unaccented your English is, no matter if you’re student council president and get along with everyone—if you’re a Chinese girl with white parents and don’t resemble anyone else in this town full of white people, everywhere you go that question is always in everyone’s eyes, always on the tip of everyone’s tongue—even though they already know the answer to that question.

  So his asking it lights a fuse inside of me. As it burns down, I try to decide if I want to scream at him to get the hell away or if I want to cock my arm back and slap those damn sideburns off his face and send them sailing across the continent and into the goddamn Pacific Ocean.

  “It’s just that—” he starts to say, but I don’t let him finish.

  I push in my chair so hard it slams into the table, making Warren jump back in his seat a bit. The people who weren’t looking before are definitely paying attention now, but I don’t even care.

  “Why do you think it’s okay to ask me that question?” I ask, leaving him no space to answer. “You must be messed up if you think you have the right to ask me that question when you don’t know me beyond whatever Facebook stalking you’ve done. Just leave me alone, okay? Just go back to whatever bridge you live under or whatever dumpster you crawled out of. Leave me alone.”

  As I’m giving this kid the death stare and he just sits there like he’s about to cry, I hear someone coming toward us past the crowded tables.

  “Emily, is this guy bothering you?” a guy asks, touching my elbow.

  I pull my elbow away and turn to him. He’s a balding middle-aged guy in a suit with a face like a turtle. It takes a moment, but I recognize him. It’s one of my dad’s coworkers. I forget his name, but I’m glad to see him in this moment. “Yes,” I say.

  He turns to Warren. “All right, buddy. Time for you to go.”

  “Sorry,” Warren says, real quiet. “I wasn’t trying to cause any trouble. I just . . .” He trails off. He stands up. He grabs his black coat, not bothering to put it back on, and walks away while my dad’s coworker follows close behind like my personal bodyguard. Our eyes meet one last time just before he steps out into the early darkness, and there’s something so sorrowful and so familiar there that I feel a knot form in the pit of my stomach.

  Or maybe that’s from his question upsetting me. I’m also shaking, adrenaline still coursing through my veins. I sit back down at my table, without taking off my coat, to try to calm down for a moment. I hate that I’m feeling like some stereotypical damsel in distress, but whatever. I’m just glad he’s gone.

  The people sitting nearby go back to whatever they were doing before all of this went down, and a few moments later, my dad’s coworker reappears. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

  “Yes,” I say, eyes on the table where the boy was scraping at the encrusted food. “I mean, yes, I’m okay. Not that he hurt me. He didn’t hurt me. Just said some stupid things.”

  He shakes his head and makes a sound of disgust. “Boys. Some of them can just—they just don’t know how to respect women anymore.”

  I shrug.

  He lingers.

  “I’m really okay,” I say. “You can go back to getting your coffee. I’ll be fine. Just a bit shaken up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you need a ride home or anything?”

  I shake my head. “I drove.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Did you want anything? Another coffee or a scone? Maybe a muffin? It’s on me.”

  “I’m good,” I say. “Thanks, though.”

  “Sure thing.” He hangs around for a few seconds longer than he needs to and says, “Tell your father I said hi,” and finally walks away.

  I sit at the table for a few minutes longer. I don’t even take off my hat. I just sit there staring at the table until I stop shaking, until my heart slows down, until the burning fuse fizzles out.

  Finally, I get up and walk out. I leave behind the warmth and the light and the scent of coffee and push through the door into the quiet cold of the evening, the early darkness making it feel later than I know it is. It’s stopped snowing, and a few inches of fresh white blankets the world. Suggestions of the sidewalk, the parking lot, and the cars sit under the pale light of the parking lot lamps. Only a few tire tracks and footprints disrupt the white, but the plows haven’t come through yet.

  The world is silent except for the muffled crunch of the snow under my boots. Gloved hands buried in my pockets and my head still in some strange space, I make my way to my car—or at least the buried form that sits in the place where I think I parked.

  When I get to it, I find something strange: a folded square of paper sticking out from the snow that covers the driver’s side door. I pluck it from the ice and unfold it. It’s a page torn from a book with something written in pen. It takes me a moment of struggling to figure out what it says before I realize that I’m looking at the wrong side. The pen has bled through from the other side of the page. I turn it over, angle it under the parking lot lamp, and read:

  I’m sorry. I was also adopted. I just wanted to talk to someone about it. —W

  My heart drops.

  I’m an asshole.

  Warren Lucas was just trying to reach out to me, and I blew up on him. Shamed him in public when he was just trying to find someone to talk to, someone who knew what he was going through. Wasn’t that the same thing I was trying to do when I sent that stupid swab with my saliva to that stupid company so they could match my DNA against their database to find any of my biological relatives? Isn’t that the connection I wanted when they gave me the name of a second cousin and I tracked her down and messaged her? Isn’t that all any of us are looking for—someone who understands us in a way nobody else can?

  But how was I supposed to know? Shouldn’t he have opened with this vital piece of information? Instead, he just awkwardly fumbled through a conversation as if he was hitting on me. How else was I supposed to take it? Besides, what is he to me?

  Bah. I should find him and apologize, at least. Maybe it’s not too late. He couldn’t have gone far. I tear my eyes away from his sad three sentences and scan the parking lot, but there’s no sign of him. I trudge through the snow back to the entrance to the coffee shop, clutching his note in my gloved hand. I look down at the snow-covered sidewalk and see my set of footprints and then a second set heading in the opposite direction. I follow them down the strip mall, past the closing stores, and around the side of the building.

  But then the tracks disappear into a patch of damp cement that leads all the way down the rear of the long building where it must have been blocked from the wind. Still, I follow the patch, hoping to find where the tracks pick up again or even more so hoping to find Warren propped up against one of the dumpsters smoking so I can apologize, or if not apologize, just talk about things, about everything.

  I reach the other end of the building without finding either, though. No tracks. No damaged boy with sideburns self-medicating with cigarettes.

  I sigh.

  Oh, well. I tried. I can probably find him online later.

  Slowly, I cross the snow-covered lot back to my car. Without brushing off any snow, I pull open the door and slip inside, knocking a few flakes from around the doorframe onto the driver’s seat. I slam the door closed, throw my bag in the passenger seat, and just sit there trying to make sense of the evening.

  I watch my breath puff out in front of my face in small white clouds. The snow still covers all the windows, blocking out the light from the parking
lot lamps, encasing me in my own little world.

  Finally, I dig my keys out of my pocket and slip the car key into the ignition, though it takes me a few tries since I keep my gloves on. The engine rumbles to life. I turn the heat all the way up and switch on the defrosters, even though the vents are still blowing cold air.

  This.

  This feels like the right moment.

  I slip off my right glove and dig my phone from my bag. I pull up the message from my long-lost supposed second cousin, the only living person in the world I know of who shares my blood.

  But I still can’t bring myself to read it.

  Warren Lucas, with his two first names and his muttonchops and his yin-yang necklace, keeps popping into my brain. I was so caught up in my own thing that he wasn’t even real to me. I wonder what he would have said if we had actually talked, what I would have said. I wonder if he knows any of his biological relatives and, if so, if that makes him feel any less alone. It’s not that I’m not loved by the people who are actually in my life, but it’s just—it’s hard to explain. Even to myself.

  My thoughts are interrupted by the rumbling scrape of a passing snowplow. After the sound fades, I click on the windshield wipers. It takes them a few swings, but the snow isn’t as heavy or as frozen as it can sometimes be, so it’s not long before I have a clear view of the parking lot. Several other cars sit encased in white, and I wonder if there is anyone else sitting within any of them.

  A light flickers at the other end of the strip mall. A minivan rolls along a freshly plowed path in front of me. The snow begins to fall again.

  I read the message.

  Randy Ribay is the author of the contemporary YA novels After the Shot Drops (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) and An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes (Merit Press, 2015). He’s also a high school English teacher, reader, gamer, watcher of great TV, husband, and father of two dog-children. He can probably be found somewhere making lightsaber sound effects with his mouth.

  “Every single child, without question, needs and deserves unconditional love.”

  Deeply

  by William Ritter

  Obsidian waters roiled beneath the cliffs of Hartkin. Scarcely a breeze stirred the air in the quiet little town, and yet, far below, buoys rocked madly and fishing boats strained against their moorings, clattering together like heavy wind chimes. The ocean was angry. It churned up seafood and sediment and the briny stench of something else. Something old.

  The rain had not yet begun to fall, but from his position atop the bluff, Jay could feel it coming. He didn’t mind. He hadn’t even bothered to zip up his jacket. Jay enjoyed the rain. He enjoyed the hot sun and the biting frost. He enjoyed the smell of pine needles and even the taste of dust. He just enjoyed being in the world.

  Mostly, if he was being honest, Jay enjoyed not being in school. His new classmates were fine, all except the Patterson twins—who were jerks—and Henry Hinkler—who always sat too close and smelled like warm bologna. His new teacher, Ms. Espinoza, was okay, if a bit dull. She had assigned Jay’s least favorite project on Friday, though. Every teacher got around to it eventually. It made Jay’s stomach turn in knots. The Family Tree.

  There was nothing about real families that looked like trees. His was less a tree and more a complicated mess of broken branches, of limbs grafted on at odd angles, and of other trees that had grown tangled with his own. And then there were all the branches that mattered to Jay, but didn’t properly connect to his tree at all. Branches that he only wished were a part of his tree.

  Last year, Mrs. Winslow had given everybody premade charts with tidy little boxes to fill in, but the handouts left room for only one mommy and one daddy. Jay had stared at the boxes until he wanted to cry. And then some other things happened, and pretty soon Mrs. Winslow was squawking at him for flipping over his desk and Jay was yelling and there may or may not have been biting. That was when Mrs. Winslow said she was going to call Jay’s mother, which only made matters worse.

  That had been at Jay’s last school. Before the move. Before the adoption. Before, well, before complicated got more complicated. Nobody seemed to understand. Family was weird.

  Jay sat with his feet dangling over the edge of the cliff and pulled a ragged, faded yellow duck from his backpack. Yucky Ducky was stained and had been inexpertly repaired along one seam with mismatched orange thread. Jay could not remember a time before Yucky Ducky. The plush doll was dingy and juvenile, he knew, but he kept it with him at all times.

  Once, last year, stupid ugly Oliver Hampton saw him with it and told everyone at recess that Jay played with baby toys. Jay’s face flushed red hot with embarrassment, and he had thought about throwing the duck away right then and there—but he couldn’t do it. Yucky Ducky had been there for him. It was broken and frayed and it had been left, forgotten in the dark, countless times. But so had Jay.

  Let them laugh. Yucky Ducky had been through it all with him, which was more than anyone else in the whole wide world could say.

  The ocean heaved. A great dark shape welled beneath the surface, impossibly vast. Jay watched as the remaining seagulls abandoned the rocks below and soared toward calmer waters up the shore. The smell was almost tangible now. Something was rising.

  “Your momma never teach you to stay away from the cliffs, dweeb?” jeered a voice behind him.

  Jay groaned. Not one but both of the Patterson twins were sauntering across the clearing toward him. Marcus and Lucas—not that Jay could ever tell them apart—were the tag-team bullies of Hartkin Elementary. Jay pulled himself to his feet to face the thugs. The twins were each a foot taller than Jay and built like sacks of cement with skin.

  Jay had met plenty of boys like the Patterson twins before, kids who just liked to cause trouble wherever they went. His foster parents had called kids like them “troubled youth,” which Jay had always thought was a backward sort of way to describe totally obnoxious jerks—until one day he overheard his caseworker call him a “troubled youth,” while she was on the phone and thought he couldn’t hear her.

  Jay didn’t want to be a troubled youth. He didn’t want trouble.

  The Patterson twins, on the other hand, appeared to have embraced trouble with both meaty hands.

  “I don’t think he heard you, Luke,” said one of the twins. “You should say it again—harder.”

  “You don’t wanna get too close to the edge,” warned Lucas. “It’s dangerous!” As he said it, he pretended to lunge at Jay, who was smart enough not to back away. Behind him was a fifty-foot drop to the tumultuous black waters of the cape.

  “What do you buttheads want?” Jay asked, trying to sound tough, even as his eyes searched for an escape. All he needed was an opening to dart past the twins and run away. The Pattersons might have been slabs of raw muscle, but they were slow slabs of raw muscle. He could outrun them any day if he could just . . .

  The twins seemed to read his mind. They closed in, blocking Jay with his back to the steep cliff.

  “What’d you call us?” said Marcus. “Your momma never teach you no manners, neither?”

  “I heard he doesn’t even have a mom,” said Lucas.

  “Naw, he’s got parents,” said Marcus. “I heard his mom is, like, crazy or something, and his dad’s some kinda deadbeat.” Jay’s entire body clenched as he glared at the Patterson twins. He wanted to run away and fight and barf all at once.

  Lucas did not respond right away. Something else had caught his attention. “Dude, Mark,” he said, his eyes shooting over Jay’s shoulder. “Look.”

  Marcus ignored his brother, not finished toying with their victim yet. “Whatcha got there, dweeb?” With a quick swipe, he grabbed Yucky Ducky out of Jay’s hand.

  “Give it back!” yelled Jay.

  “Or what?” Marcus dangled the toy just out of reach above Jay’s head. “What is this, anyway? Are you in p
reschool?”

  “Mark, dude, look at the water!” Lucas had gone curiously pale, but his brother still wasn’t listening.

  “Your crazy mom give this to you?” Marcus sneered.

  Jay was shaking with anger now. “Yes.” He could feel the hot tears welling in his eyes. He clenched his fists. “She did. Now give it BACK.”

  “Wha . . . what is that thing?” Lucas stammered. He stumbled backward and tripped, falling onto his back with his eyes still fixed on the ledge.

  “It’s a stupid dolly,” said Marcus. “I think it’s supposed to be a duck.”

  “It’s MINE,” said Jay.

  “If you want it so much,” Marcus snarled, “go get it!” He whipped Yucky Ducky up over Jay’s head, high into the air and then down, down, down, tumbling toward the salty waves.

  The sneer left his face as his eyes followed the duck.

  Jay took a deep breath. “You think my mom was crazy?” he said quietly. “You should meet my new dad.”

  The wet hell that erupted from the inky sea below has no name in any human tongue. Tentacles writhed like a mountain of snakes. Somewhere within them there might have been a body, but if a body there was, it was coated with untold eons of barnacles and strange weeds that draped and clung to its dark flesh.

  The Patterson twins stared, dumbstruck. A great glistening tentacle slammed into the hillside to their right. The tallest, oldest tree in Hartkin could not have fallen with a heavier crash. The tendril was like a slimy, meaty hillside.

  Marcus leaped aside, tripping gracelessly over his brother as Lucas attempted to get back to his feet. The twins righted themselves just in time to see a second tentacle, as broad as a house and long as a railway train, come hammering down to their left. The walls of dark, undulating flesh now cut them off completely from the rest of the world.

  And then came the voice.

  THEIR EMPTY HUSKS SHALL SINK INTO THE DARKEST DEPTHS, AND THEIR BONES SHALL BE SCATTERED TO THE FURTHEST CORNERS OF THE UNDERSEA.